There are restaurants that slap “fusion” on the menu and hope for the best, and then there’s Osteria Angelina.
Tucked away in Nicholls & Clarke Yard, just off Shoreditch’s busy Blossom Street, this is the newer, more casual sibling of Dalston’s much-loved Angelina and it takes the same Italian-meets-Japanese idea and turns it into a proper, plate-after-plate dinner.
The setting helps. Osteria Angelina has that polished-but-not-stuffy East London energy: buzzy tables and a lively open kitchen.
It’s the sort of place you book for a birthday, a long-overdue mate date, or a Tuesday you’ve decided deserves treating like a Friday.
We started, as everyone should, with the Hokkaido milk bread, jam and burnt honey butter. It arrived soft, pillowy and faintly sweet, with the burnt honey butter adding a caramelised, almost toasty edge.
We ordered it to share. This was, in hindsight, a strategic error.
Usman’s Magic Tomato Salad earned its name. The tomatoes were punchy and ripe, lifted by a bright salsa verde granita that keeps the whole thing fresh rather than overly rich. It is a proper “vegetarian dish that makes the meat dishes nervous” kind of plate, and a smart early signal of how confident the kitchen is with vegetables.
The tuna, house ponzu and wasabi is the palate cleanser before the real carb chapter begins.
But the pasta is where Osteria Angelina really shows off.
The tortellini with truffle and kombu was one of the evening’s highlights: delicate pasta, a deeply savoury filling, and that clever combination of earthy truffle and marine, umami-rich kombu. It manages to taste both comforting and distinctly Japanese-Italian, without either cuisine elbowing the other out of the way
The bottoni with miso aubergine and pine nut furikake is its slightly rowdier cousin. Plump pasta, sweet-smoky aubergine and a nutty, savoury crunch from the furikake make it ridiculously moreish. If the tortellini is the one you’d recommend to your most food-snobbish friend, this is the one you’ll be dreaming about on the way home.
Just when you think you’re done, the Gloucester dry-aged pork chop arrives and reminds you why Osteria Angelina has a grill at all. Cooked over binchotan charcoal, it comes deeply charred on the outside and juicy within, with that concentrated, almost nutty flavour that only proper dry-ageing delivers.
It’s a sharing dish in the best possible way: big enough to feel celebratory, and guaranteed to spark a quiet but determined competition for the final slices.
Should you go?
Absolutely. Osteria Angelina manages the tricky thing of making fusion feel natural rather than novelty. It’s got the Italian generosity, Japanese precision and a kitchen that clearly knows exactly what it’s doing.
